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Free Open Source Software Is Costing Vendors $60 Billion?
conan1989 writes to tell us that a recent report from the Standish Group is claiming that open source is costing the traditional software market somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 billion per year in revenue. "MySQL Marten Mickos has often spoken of 'taking a $10 billion market and making it a $3 billion market.' If you consider that open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues there will be a bloodletting in the proprietary world soon enough. It's a great time to be an open source company."
I pointed this study out yesterday during the "Is Open Source the Answer To Giving?" discussion and was promptly modded up, down, up, down, ad infinitum (probably because I was trying to merely provide the unpopular side/view of the issue but I digress).
More importantly, you should pay attention to the several insightful and interesting comments that followed which point out French Economist Bastiat's Parable of the Broken Window.
Whether you hate it or not, it does no good to ignore this contempt that so much of corporate America holds for open source! Take the time to inform your boss or coworker who claims losses directly to open source efforts.
My work here is dung.
This idea is an instance of the broken window fallacy. If the money had to have been spent on proprietary software, it wouldn't have been used for other things. In the end, FOSS software is a win for us all.
This kind of "Look how much money we're not making" is stupid regardless of who is espousing it. They're trying to prove a negative, and monetize a handful of nothing, and the sick part about it is that they honestly think that they're not completely crazy.
This is just like the RIAA trying to put a dollar figure on money lost to filesharing, or the press trying to put a dollar figure on "productivity loss" based on this or that sports event. They just need to get a freaking life, and start trying to measure things that exist.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
I wonder how this revenue is calculated. Is it done the same way that RIAA calculates lost revenue? If I install Open Office on my laptop, that doesn't mean that I would have bought proprietary software and put that on there if there were no Open Source options. Plus, is this factoring in the lower cost to develop software by using open source utilities?
If you are about to mod me down, keep in mind that this post was most likely sarcastic.
In the long run, it has balance out somewhere. Money doesn't disappear. It's the old overused notion of squeezing a balloon again... we have to figure out where the bulge is.
Will they NEVER stop whining.
It's pathetic.
Oh, my God, we need more Microsoft programmers.
Oh, my God, we need more h1b visa workers.
Oh, my God, the programmers we displaced are competing with us and winning.
that open source is saving those vendors' customers $60 billion.
The wheelchair industry would be a $10 trillion dollar a year industry if people didn't have legs. But since people are indeed born with legs, it is a moot point.
Better known as 318230.
Partial dup? Wasn't the $60B debunked yesterday? Anyway, as a software vendor that depends on MySQL, I think this "open source is cool" story was just put out there by Sun's PR team to deflect attention away from their accidental "even more of MySQL will be pay-to-play" in the future announcement. Hey MySQL, thanks for the help getting my product to market, but now it's time for some vendor independence; buh-bye.
That would be "costing other software vendors" in the same sense that the RIAA and the MPAA are "losing money from piracy". It makes the HUGE assumption that everyone who uses open source software is someone who would otherwise have purchased the "traditional" software. This is simply not true. However human beings are very good at pulling numbers out of their asses, and since politicians are used to talking shit, they readily believe these numbers.
Wow, let's make a law that outlaws open source software, to "protect" the "traditional" software industry. At the same time it will fight terrorism (because terrorists use open source software) and help the children (because open source is BAD). Yes you sarcasm impaired mods, learn to spot it when you see it.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
Right.
It's not costing anything. It's competing. Very effectively, I might add.
In the same frame of mind, I'd be curious to know if this group also considers IT a "liability."
The title should read "Free Open Source Software is SAVING CONSUMERS $60 Billion" It is not costing vendors a dime.
FOXTROT UNIFORM CHARLIE KILO
A lost sale is not a cost. You could just as easily say that Microsoft is costing Red Hat money by selling server OSes. That would be as ludicrous.
I imagine that the local bands selling their CDs for five bucks apiece is costing the RIAA labels tons of money too. Know ahet? I consider it a GOOD thing.
I also consider it a GOOD thing that free software "costs" Microsoft money. Because, you know, I hate their software, I hate their business methods, and frankly I don't care too much for Gates and Ballmer.
Your bad is my good. Costing you? Well GOOD! Well done, FOSS! Here's to you kind sirs!
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
You can say anything with statistics, particularly when you're trying to show how much something costs.
I can take that exact same stat, and say that it's given businesses a $60 billion saving. Just think how much more competitive our businesses are now that they're saving all that money!
So you see, it's a double-edged sword: a cost to one person is a saving to another.
The fact is that when you start talking about that sort of money, it's never actually as clear-cut as a single statistic can make it sound. Anyone who does try to boil it down to a simplistic headline like that is almost certainly trying to put their own spin on it. (and yes, that includes me)
Okay first off, a better article than link in summary: Marketwire article
Now as for seeing the actual study: The Standish Group's "The Trends in Open Source" report is available free of charge to Standish Group subscribers. Non-subscribers may obtain copies directly from The Standish Group at: http://www.standishgroup.com/market_research/index.php for $1,000 per copy.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
Specifically, the closed-source software vendors.
Consider: No matter how much marketing you have, it is ultimately up to the end user of a product to decide if they've gotten the value they expected to get. If said user finds that the closed-source product they paid (possibly) big bucks for isn't worth the media it was recorded on, they're going to cut their losses and try something else.
Alternatively, there are many small businesses that simply can't afford the kinds of prices that closed-source vendors often charge. I know this for a fact, because I'm one of those tiny businesses! If not for FreeBSD, Apache, and Postfix, to say nothing of the surplus hardware market, I would never have been able to get my Internet presence off the ground.
It's not just Freeware, either. How many of us have found low-cost Shareware products to be incredibly useful for the stuff we do, when comparable commercial products would have nearly required a second mortgage? Hex Workshop is, I think, a great example.
If that $60 billion figure is accurate, the commercial software vendors have no one but themselves to blame. Oh, there are some good values Out There, yes, but I think they've been largely drowned out by the flood of questionable products that are turned out with far more marketing than quality engineering.
Happy tweaking.
Bruce Lane, KC7GR,
Blue Feather Technologies
We just completed a study for a company selling bottled oxygen: the free availability of air on the planet causes them losses in the neighborhood of $866 billions in revenue -- annually!
In theory, money exists merely to facilitate the barter system by providing an abstract representation of wealth. We tend to associate a high dollar velocity with wealth creation, though the two are not really the same thing.
Open Source software is, by any reasonable definition, valuable. The individual programs are useful products that people want. Their existence makes the community (in this case, the whole planet) more wealthy. Therefore, open source is not the value-sink that its competitors would dress it up as being.
Has anybody done an study on how much is generating for the users. Of course we have those same 60 billions saved. But I mean not only by direct savings in licenses, but by novel uses in places where licensed software would be uneconomical, new business that could not have been created otherwise, etc.
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Another fallacy that is often used in reports like this or reports on software piracy is the idea that every copy that is floating out there for free would have been paid for if the software was somehow not available for free--either legitimately through FOSS or illegitimately through piracy.
That's simply not true.
For example, I can download Apache Derby for free and have a SQL engine for my various projects. Had Derby and MySQL and the like not been available, I wouldn't go out and buy a SQL product--chances are, I'd home grow my own custom database. For many of my projects SQL is overkill, but because its free, I may as well use SQL than a couple of fixed-width flat files--even though fixed-width flat files would probably work just fine.
Back in the 80's I knew a fellow who collected pirated software. He never used the software--he just collected it because he thought it was cool. Realistically, had it been impossible for him to collect software he would have never bothered. So realistically speaking while he had thousands of dollars of pirated software on his computer, because he never used it or had any need for the software he copied (it was just a weird hobby of his), he would never buy the software even if it was impossible for him to otherwise obtain copies. So he never represented a sale to the software makers whose wares he was copying.
One also has to wonder what economic benefit has arisen from FOSS. While its true that, for example, I'd hate to go into the database business--it's a complicated business and there is no money to be made because of MySQL and Derby and other free database engines out there--end-user applications seem to be thriving. "Infrastructure" software--stuff like databases and web servers and the like have become free, and going into a business to sell a $10k software solution to compete against Apache Tomcat would be silly. But on the other hand, how much value has been built on top of that infrastructure that simply wouldn't exist if that infrastructure was expensive and the barrier to entry high?
Well, open source itself is a reasonably new name, but certainly public domain or at least freely distributable software has been around for decades, and so far as I'm aware, has popped up in just about every operating system during that time.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Of course, that means the open source vendors are providing over $60 billion of additional value to customers, who are able to divert whatever would be spent on proprietary software to more productive use.
In other words, it is making the overall market more efficient. That's just Economics 101.
For those who try to spin this as some sort of problem, can you imagine if a single company owned a patent granting them exclusive rights to produce what Apache provides for free? The gains to said company would pale in comparison to the astronomical loss to the overall marketplace.
-- My choice of computing platform is a symbol of my individuality and belief in personal freedom.
Good job not doing any research at all. Despite the sensational headline a few days ago, Nothing that is Open source in MySql will be close sourced in the future. They will introduce a few add on backup products that will not be open, none of which exist today. So if you are happy with the current MySql, nothing is going to change. You'll still have full access to the course code you have today and any and all improvements that come in the future.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
This is Slashdot. We know that there is no need to pay people to break Windows. It was already broken when we got here.
I hate printers.
I think both you and the Standish Group are making a mistake I call the RIAA fallacy. That's the assumption that every time somebody gets something for free (or very cheaply) it subtracts one from sales of a more expensive equivalent.
The truth is that cost often determines whether something gets purchased at all. If new cars are too expensive, people will make their existing cars last a year or two longer. (Or not replace their horse-and-buggy with a car, an insight that made Henry Ford rich.) People didn't even see the need for a personal computer until they became cheap enough for everybody to afford one. And if upgrading its IT is too expensive, a company will very likely make do with its existing IT.
- Non-Smoking is Costing Toback Industry $1200 Billion.
... (f*&k cnet btw.)
- Healthy Food is Costing McDonalds $4.2 Trillion.
- Singing is Costing RIAA $5.4 Quadrillion.
- Islam is Costing Jack Daniels $43 Billion.
- You not Giving Me You Money is Costing Me $120.000.
You name it
I don't think the broken window scenario applies to this situation. Nothing is being destroyed, so the question isn't one of having to buy something vs not having to buy it. The question is buying expensive vs buying inexpensive, which is simple supply/demand economics. I'd go even further, and suggest that the "loss" is fictitious. It is really an overestimate of the sales on the proprietary software vendor's part.
If there is a loss anywhere, it's that only a fraction of the $60 billion is winding up in the pockets of open source developers. Granted, they're in it for the satisfaction of writing well written code, and the peer recognition that comes from that, but it wouldn't hurt for them to see some green from it as well.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If, instead of saying "open source has taken out $60 billion of traditional software revenues," the article said "open source has saved businesses over $60 billion in expense compared to traditional software," don't you think people might view it differently?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
People in general aren't great innovators. Most "best of breed" products are just
rehashes of someone else's idea. They're cloned or bought from others who may or
may not have had any part in "innovation" either.
Innovation is just a buzzword used to sell pointless upgrades and justify
uncivilized business practices.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Suggesting I didn't buy an enterprise Oracle license because I installed MySQL isn't just a Broken Window Fallacy. For the tiny purpose I needed it for, it's more like suggesting that because nobody has written my Peugeot off, Ferrari are out of pocket the price of a 612 Scaglietti.
"I Know You Are But What Am I?"
This is Slashdot. We know that there is no need to pay people to break Windows. It was already broken when we got here
I often wonder how many billions all the free high-quality insight and advice that we give out here at Slashdot costs consultants in lost revenue.
First, you have to write code good enough to make it into a redhat distro in order for them to pay you to fix it. Secondly, you have to write enough code for them to just hire you to maintain it for long term profitability in this manner. Thirdly, once someone else writes a replacement package, or cleans up your code base well enough, they get paid by redhat to maintain your code.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
C'mon people! Get your game in gear, and triple this figure!
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
I keep installing and trying OpenOffice from time to time. I've a veteran user of word processors--I gnawed at the teat of WordStar and GeoWorks Writer, was enamored of AmiPro, put in my time with WordPerfect, and have been using MS Word as long as I have been married (15 years). While I can make my way around just fine, some things either don't work well or are non-intuitive to other members of my family who, admittedly, were reared on MS Word. I just installed the latest version of the OpenOffice Writer to a brand new laptop two weeks ago mostly because I could not find my MS Office XP Pro CDs--I had that installed on my previous laptop. After my most recent experiences, I'll be uninstalling OpenOffice as soon as I find those CDs.
The handling of the scroll speed when doing a click and drag highligh was dreadful. If I stayed on the same page, everything was fine, but if I had to cross a page border, the scrolling would speed up so much that I overshot my mark--by a page or more--almost every time.
When I didn't see an immediate option to edit the header area, and since I've learned the ropes of many word processing programs and have no aversion to searching out features, I found it as an option under "Insert". Sure, I found it, but when my wife had OpenOffice (the full suite) installed on her laptop a few months ago, she didn't find it until after I showed it to her. I don't even find that menu choice intuitive. I assume that the header is already there, hidden from view. I'd expect to view the header, not insert it.
Oh, and if they would like to see OpenOffice used more in an academic setting, they really need to include a control for hanging indents in the paragraph format dialog box.
If saving in ODF, I had no problems at all with formatting, but once I set the default save format to be MS Word XP compatibtle (because one of my grad school profs requires MS Word documents and won't even take RTF), I had problems:
- When re-opening documents saved in the MS Office XP-compatible format, spaces would disappear between words (seemingly) at random. I'd find the problem in a different section of the document each time I opened it.
- I kept losing marks because my papers were, supposedly, not submitted in APA format (something I was careful to do before I sent them in). So, I did what any techie would do--I took a copy of the document to one of my other PCs that still has Office installed, and the document opened with different formatting. All of the first line indents were gone. My hanging indents on the References page were gone, too. That explained the lost points, but I had to wonder "Why?"
I know there are those of you out there who love OpenOffice to death. Good for you. I'm not posting this to rip OpenOffice.org as much to concur about the point that was made about much Open Souce programming not being consumer-friendly. It's certainly a viable option for some, but I found even myself getting frustrated with all of its little quirks and variables. No, I didn't take time to report these annoying issues. I just wanted to get my papers done. Remember that my mindset here--that I did not want to spend time reporting issues because I just wanted to get my work done--is really one of the main things people need to understand about the consumer marketplace. People don't want to learn some new software in order to create documents, they just want to create documents. Whether or not you like it, Microsoft has had a huge influence on the user experience with software. If you want to ensure consumers will have no qualms about your Open Source project (and by "no qualms" I mean that you reduce the chance that they will try you and dump you to near zero), make sure it behaves the way they expect it to behave. To all in the Open Source movement, good luck in making that happen--I wish you all the best. To the OpenOffice.org folks: I'll try you again after the next major release, or in about a year, whichever is first.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
In related news, the Sheriff of Nottingham has announced that poverty has increased 600% since Robin Hood arrived. "The lack of money in the King's treasure vault is more than enough proof that poverty has invaded our glorious country", he said.
As other's have pointed out in several ways, losing revenue to competition is not a cost. Putting that aside for the moment, I do think the soft cost of some of my proprietary sw choices over the years is a true cost. Let's say an IT staff spends 15% of the year dealing with the short comings of proprietary sw... if we tally that across the industry, I bet it's not that small a cost (even relative to imaginary $60 B loss). How much time has been spent dealing with mal-ware due to a particular OS (or its associated email clients) being insecure? I suspect that time represents a HUGE cost.
It may be costing the "traditional" software market 60 billion a year in revenue...
But consider therefore, that it's saving customers 60 billion and possibly a lot more (less costly for customers to maintain license compliance etc).
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
Disclaimer: I'm far from an open source zealot, and while I've been 100% free software based for years, I'm currently 90% commercial software, both at home (which I personally paid for every single bit, not a single pirated software) and at work.
Seriously... thats silly. Open Source just diversify the market. Instead of SQL Server and Oracle saturating the market with a poorly suited solution, you have PostgreSQL and MySQL (and more) catering to a segment of the market which doesn't require SQL Server and Oracle, and let the big names (I use those 2, there's more) commercial ones fill up the rest of the market, or force them to add more value (for example, ETL, Datawarehouseing, etc) by making basic feature a commodity (if all you need is flat tables to run SQL on, you don't need Oracle).
So really, Free Software isn't taking money from anyone... they just force market expension. If free databases didn't exist, the commercial databases would have less features than now, and going after a smaller niche, to sell probably exactly the same amount of licenses as they are selling now.
If you release a crappy widget with bugs and someone else releases a good widget in which those bugs were repaired, they will eat up your market share. Given the availability of competition in providing/supporting Linux, your suggestion is crazy. The reason the question comes up is because there is no competition for the Windows product (Linux is a different kind of widget in this aspect). While you are correct that Microsoft are not the only commercial vendor, they are the only vendor which can sell Windows. Oracle may have a proprietary database, but it does have to compete with other (now even Open Source) database products. There is nothing keeping other databases from competing, whereas Microsoft can and does effectively stifle operating system competition by being so proprietary. This issue can be applied towards any company that acts like them. Imagine Oracle using some old patent to control SQL and not allow other vendors to incorporate it into their database.
Since Red-Hat as an Open Source vendor do not have control over their code after releasing it (which Microsoft retains), customers are free to find another company to fix those problems. They are also free to move to a competing distribution (an equivalent widget). In the broken window, the vandal is assumed to have a high likelihood of gaining the victim's business, which is clearly not the case with Linux. In addition, the placement of intentional bugs is likely to be noticed and/or otherwise publicized in the community, akin perhaps to the glazier not wearing gloves when he throws rocks at windows (fingerprints). The reward is not worth this risk, since nothing forces customers to stay with Red Hat should this kind of activity be made public.
Thus, Red-Hat has a huge incentive to provide good products and actual support, and also an incentive not to risk its reputation.
The development of the automobile is costing the traditional blacksmith industry an estimated $3 billion a year.
I guess you could say that the $10b database market didn't grow to that amount because of open source, but only if you're counting a loss of revenue per website hosted on MySQL (or each MySQL installation). However those websites wouldn't have existed if they had to pay for MySQL, or they would have used plain text databases, or some other technology.
A company moving from Oracle to MySQL should have its head examined.
On the other hand without MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc, Oracle and MSSQLServer could have far higher licensing costs that aren't actually a fair reflection of their value to the market. Oracle is still a stupidly high price, but there is OracleXE now.
It's survival of the fittest. Database costs were so high in the past, people felt it necessary to write alternatives, and over time those alternatives improved to be competitive because there was such a demand. This means that the market was never $10b in value, only in price for a short time until the unsustainable price created competition that brought the market down to its true value.
Oh, i'm wittering here now and someone who's studied finance and business will shoot me down anyway.
I think it applies the opposite way -- the fallacy of the broken window is that the shopkeeper is forced to spend money he otherwise doesn't have to. He spends money on the glazier, instead of the baker -- the glazier could then spend money on the baker.
In this story, the proprietary vendors are the glaziers. The glazier may indeed lose business, but it is no cost to the economy as a whole, and it is a benefit to the shopkeeper, who can now spend money on things other than software.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
One the one hand, proprietary companies scoff at F/OSS, claiming that F/OSS market share is insignificant. On the other hand, proprietary companies claim F/OSS is killing their revenue stream.
Which is it?
if my livelyhood depends on fixing problems with my code, what incentive do I have to ship it bug-free to begin with?
In the free software world? If you ship a code that's malicious or intentionally defective someone else will fix it and leave you out in the cold.
In the non free software world? None at all. Every few years you will sell the same crap with a new GUI. M$ has proved this over the last 20 years.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"open source has saved businesses over $60 billion in expense compared to traditional software, and created a new multi-billion dollar support industry."
That wasn't hard, was it?
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Only aspiring monopolists count their competitors' revenues, and their customers' savings, as "losses".
Open source can be nice because it allows the customer of a particular piece of software who isn't big enough to get a modification made to have the ability to do it. Free software is another matter. This is a corporation's dream. Software that is created by individuals free of charge that the corporation can redistribute or sell support contracts for? Priceless. Redhat? IBM? They don't have to write the software, but they are enriched by the distribution and support of it. Yes there may be a net positive result to the economy when small businesses use the software but make no mistake the value of doing the actual programming starts to tend towards zero. Add outsourcing and offshoring and it will be only hobbyists that produce software. Interesting that the 'egalitarian' giving of software tends to hurt those who give it (who might sell their skills otherwise) and enrich those who would formerly have had to pay for the software.
The alternative title which says the same thing is: "Free Open Source Software Is Saving Companies $60 Billion A Year".
This whole thing is backwards. All of software companies I've worked at, for the last 13 or 14 years, have benefited from Open Source Software at one level or another. In these cases anyway the products gained features, or time to market that would have otherwise taken years of manpower and money to develop in house. Has anyone bothered to explain this to the economists?
Do you know how much money home cooked meals are costing the restaurant industry?
The article's terrible economic reasoning is exactly the kind of folly that dooms planned economies. The defense of established interests is cast as defense of the common welfare, and the economy gets gummed up with mandatory crud that is deemed essential even though nobody wants it.
In a market system, companies aren't be allowed to justify their existence through whining. If a software vendor can't offer something that people want to buy, then they serve no economic purpose.
If you think open-source software "costs" the economy money by displacing commercial software, then I suppose you also think it's a straightforward win to ban cheap, superior imported goods so domestic manufacturers can sell inferior, overpriced goods.
Even if you believe the most likely number of bugs in your code is zero, that is not very different from believing that the number of bugs is higher. You should never act on the belief that your code is bug-free.
MySQL is grateful for all code contributions we get, and we will leave all contributions we receive under the GPL as GPL.
The idea is that when you contribute code, you get a better product in return, and everyone gets to see the code that you produced.
forge.mysql.com is a great starting place for contributors.
Marten
http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/02/25/2038217
Now go away.
Now that is a pretty amazing achievement, and open source coders and the companies that support them should be congratulated.
That is a massive achievement, open source software it is already saving $60 billion dollars per year, imagine what will be achieved in five years time, savings of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. It would be virtually suicide for companies to stick with the millstone of closed source proprietary software and be stuck with the costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
Sometimes those knuckle heads just forget there are other companies besides M$ and M$'s profits are in reality other companies losses, let alone the 10 to 100 times hundreds factor of using their software even after you have paid for it (well it actually never stop paying for it until you finally crossgrade/upgrade to open source software and start making those billions of dollars of savings ;D).
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
No, windows and Linux are both OS platforms and are, for the purposes of development, equally open (otherwise no one could write software for either windows or Linux)... Apple begs to differ...
You missed the point. I'm not talking about competition in developing applications for the operating system. I'm talking about developing a replacement operating system which can take the place of Windows. Apple has not and will never do that because they cannot develop an operating system which can run Quicken, Taxcut and Halo 3 (as long as these continue to be based on Microsoft's proprietary Win32/.NET Windows architectures), no matter how furiously their fanboys beg to differ on their behalf. Consumer choice between products in the free market assumes that they are have strengths and weaknesses but are generally interchangeable. When you have to exchange not only the product, but your spending habits,
The false assumption here is that unless you choose open source you are choosing intentional bugs.
Is this is a straw-man or simply careless reading? I didn't and wouldn't claim that all commercial software is sabotaged. A correct reading leads to "commercial open source software cannot have intentionally placed bugs," which has no relation to "commercial software must have intentionally placed bugs." I didn't even go so far as to claim Microsoft (or your precious Apple) does this, only pointing out that others allege it and the exploring dynamics of such actions.
In addition you are assuming that there is some community dedicated to nothing but scrutinizing the source code of open source software as there is in a proprietary company (like apple).
Open source does have many people providing quality control. In important places (the kernel, major applications, etc) there are people on a full-time salary doing this just like at proprietary vendors. You must be reading the Microsoft FUD. Please note how artfully fear-mongering stats are taken from reliable sources and placed at the top of the references, while security related references are almost exclusively written by Microsoft's employees and tucked in at the bottom. This has little to do with reality, and proprietary QA personnel don't find the important
point of fact, Red-hat does not risk it's reputation since they are a support provider not the OS provider per-se...
This is perhaps the strangest thing you've said, not only because it's factually wrong in several places, but because it ignores the reality of human behavior. It's also way off topic, but I'll correct you anyway because it was a poor attempt at addressing the main point.
Software vendors' customers often have a minimal understanding of what they are "buying." You suggest to be knowledgeable and yet still don't even use the right term. How well do you think some Vice President understands copyright law and those crazy EULA's? RedHat actually used to sell boxed copies for under $100, which I'm fairly certain did not include a support contract. Now that downloading ISO's is easy, perhaps it's not economic to manufacture and ship discs of plastic containing software that can be downloaded freely.
Your understanding of RedHat's role is lacking. RH certainly is not the sole (and perhaps not even a major)